Finally, there’s hard evidence for what everyone already suspected: When it comes to Donald Trump and the 2012 GOP presidential race, the man seems to have met his moment.

According to a Pew Research Center survey released last Wednesday, 39 percent of Republicans named Trump when asked which potential presidential candidate they’ve heard the most about lately. That was more than all the other candidates put together.

And it’s no accident.

A latter-day P.T. Barnum with an insatiable appetite for attention and a knack for getting it, Trump has capitalized on two defining and interrelated features of the political-media landscape in the Obama era: the symbiosis between political provocateurs and traffic-conscious news organizations and the rise of a conservative constituency that hungers for voices that will attack President Barack Obama in sharp and unapologetic terms.

“Nobody I know in the real world of politics take this seriously, but in the world of 24/7 cable and the Internet, there is a mutual dependency because he tops the charts,” Frank Sesno, director of the school of media and public affairs at The George Washington University and a former CNN Washington bureau chief, said of Trump. “He’s quotable, he’s funny, he’s outrageous and he’s unpredictable.”

Added Sesno: “It just shows how weird the world is that channels that have the word ‘news’ in their name would consider a Trump candidacy credible.”

News outlets can point to the New York real estate mogul and reality TV star’s surge in polling as proof that voters are taking him seriously. Never mind, for a moment, that such a bump wouldn’t have been possible without the gobs of free media he received — attention that attracts eyeballs and gooses ratings for those outlets.

In addition to the media co-dependence, there’s another force at work in Trump’s rise: the appetite among an element of the Republican base for a leader who will offer no-holds-barred criticism of Obama.

With no other Republican hopefuls gaining traction, Trump has become a blinking neon stand-in for a candidate who will go beyond mainstream boundaries and make the case for why Obama isn’t just a bad president presiding over a declining America but, perhaps, an illegitimate one.

Trump’s mastery of media culture is what’s landed him at least 24 interviews on national network and cable television since his effective debut as a candidate at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, providing him with the blanket media attention that his past presidential flirtations never quite enjoyed. But it’s birtherism that serves as the rocket fuel launching Trump into presidential orbit.

“He’s the most credible voice, yet that comes into the process and says, ‘I didn’t used to believe this [about the president’s birth], but I’ve looked into this, and there is some smoke here,” explained longtime GOP strategist Alex Castellanos.

Trump’s floating of conspiracy theories is just one part of the act. Tapping into the tea party energy that coursed through the GOP’s grass roots in 2010 and carving out a space as a larger-than-life, blunt-talking outsider is the other.

“Part of it is that Trump is seen to be punching hard at the president, showing what some conservatives take to be a certain fearlessness and aggression they like to see,” said Pete Wehner, a former policy adviser to President George W. Bush. “They view Trump as a ‘fighter’ — and that appeals to a significant part of the GOP base.”

National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote in a column last week: “At a time when the media and political establishments are in disrepute, Trump’s I-won’t-play-by-your-rules outrageousness must strike many people as refreshing. Watch him flummox incredulous interviewers. Watch him stomp on pieties — not to mention good taste and facts. Watch him never back down. Trump reflects the id of a certain segment of populist opinion.”

Add in significant name recognition, a Ross Perot-like claim of business acumen and a weak GOP field and, voila, Trump appears to be a contender in the polls.

Conversations earlier this month at GOP conventions in two conservative South Carolina counties revealed activists who were eying Trump — if not totally embracing him.

“Rick Santorum would be a favorite and, as surprising as it sounds, I’m listening to Donald Trump,” said Linda Slaton, a Greenville, S.C., Republican. “I never thought I would, but I think it’s time because of the economy that we need someone that is not a politician, not a historian but is from the business sector, a CEO.”

Santorum, the veteran culture warrior and former senator, and a flamboyant New York developer-turned-reality-show-star would seem to have little in common. But both are lighting into Obama and gaining ground as a result.

“This is another telling symbol of the vacuum in Republican politics right now,” said Castellanos. “We have a weak field, and it keeps trying to pull new faces in.”

Pollster Whit Ayres, like most Republicans, dismissed the possibility that Trump would ever actually have a chance of winning the party’s nomination.

“There’s a huge gulf between flirting and getting married — Donald Trump is the flirtation of the week,” said Ayres, who is likely to work for U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign.

But Trump’s riding of the birther issue has troubled some high-profile figures in the party, as it has revived the issue and prompted questions of whether other Republican leaders and presidential candidates also have doubts about the president’s citizenship.

“When prominent figures in the party play footsie with peddlers of paranoia, the party suffers an erosion of credibility,” Wehner wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week. “While certain corners of a party’s base might be energized by conspiracy theories, the majority of the electorate will be turned off by them. People are generally uneasy about political institutions that give a home to cranks.”

Both conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer and former Bush strategist Karl Rove have also spoken out about Trump.

Such establishment Republicans fear that Trump’s focus on birtherism will only offer Democrats an escape from issues like the economy and gas prices.

Obama has all but ratified such mainline Republican worries by reveling over the degree to which Trump has pushed the issue into the public dialogue. Democrats just see it as an opportunity to portray the opposition as residing on the fringe.

“Over the last two and a half years there’s been an effort to go at me in a way that is politically expedient in the short-term for Republicans, but creates, I think a problem for them when they want to actually run in a general election where most people feel pretty confident the president was born where he says he was, in Hawaii,” Obama said in an interview with ABC, suggesting that most Americans are concerned about pocketbook issues and not “conspiracy theories.”